Page:French Calvinism, German Lutheranism and the War.pdf/10

- 9 - in Caesar's papism in the subordination of the spiritual power to the temporal power, because human nature is so constituted that spiritual interests allow themselves only too easily to be sacrificed to temporal interests. The real opposition therefore in religious political history is the opposition between a free Church and a slave Church. The real opposition is not between a catholic church and a protestant church. The word protestant is a messenger. There has been infinitely more genuine Protestantism in the history of the Roman Catholic Church than in the history of all the so-called protestant churches. For Protestantism means the protest of the individual conscience, the assertion of the independence of the spirit as against the encroachments either of the Church or of the State.

In the light of the definitions just given, I submit that the tragedy of Lutheran Germany has been that she has never made any protest. There have been no German Nonconformists, because the Germans have always conformed, they have always been docile, they have often been servile. Historically Lutheranism simply means the substitution of the immediate and